Op-ed:

John Roberts...hero in waiting? 

By: Diane Sori

Chief Justice John Roberts just might be the bravest man in America.

Knowing that he would get flack for his vote, and boy did he, Roberts still held firm and ruled according to the Constitution and by doing so gave Barack Hussein Obama a real cause to worry.

Yesterday, like everybody else, I blamed the upholding of ObamaCare on Roberts’ deciding vote.  But now as I’ve had time to really think this ruling through, I’ve come to realize one very important thing... John Roberts just gave the White House to MITT ROMNEY!

Was this his plan all along when he ruled that the government cannot force people to purchase products or services under the Commerce Clause.  Was this his way to force liberals to finally admit that ObamaCare is indeed funded by tax increases...that’s something we’ll never know.

But it’s important to remember that if Roberts had ruled with the conservative justices the vote would appear and be reported as partisan, and claims of an activist court would be lobbed at them by the left.  And that would give Obama fodder to hurl at us while he pulled the race card out of his pocket just in case it.was needed.

However, by ruling that Congress has the authority to tax, Roberts made certain that the implementation of ObamaCare did indeed make it a tax, a whopping big tax (as in the biggest in our country’s history), something Obama has said since day one that it was not.  

And that, my friends, is something Obama hoped would never be the ruling. 

So, with that call, Chief Justice Roberts has very cleverly handed Mitt Romney a platform to nail Obama on, for what better platform is there than being able to tell the American people that Obama just handed the middle and working class the mother of all tax increases.

In addition, by Roberts siding with the liberal justices, something completely and totally out of his character, and with ObamaCare standing NOT with the Obama wanted mandate but as a tax, this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barack Hussein Obama out and out lied to the American people when he said, “this is NOT a tax...your taxes will NOT increase one single dime.”

And let's not forget that with ObamaCare being ruled a tax, Congress now has the ability to revoke it.  If repealed in the House because it's a tax, it would then move to the Senate, where Senate Republicans could repeal the full law through the budget reconciliation process.

Want more good news...since the mandate has now become a tax, people all across the country are beyond mad and are contributing to ROMNEY’s campaign en-masse.  Romney’s campaign war chest increased 1.5 million dollars in just the few hours since the decision was handed down with more coming in every hour.

Thank you, John Roberts.

And here’s something that we all must remember when dealing with Obama, something Justice Roberts obviously remembered, and that is that it’s important to think outside the box, especially when we’re up against a man and his minions who have no respect for our rule of law.  Yes, we were all furious at John Roberts yesterday and that fired us all up with anger but now let's redirect that anger into getting the vote out and getting Mitt Romney in!

So, the bottom line is this, Chief Justice Roberts has actually sent us all a message clearly stating that ObamaCare is of course a TAX and a liberal Congress will never stop imposing them on us when led by Barack Hussein Obama, and that's it’s up to Congress or us voters to stop him.

With that, it's now it’s up to ‘We the People’ to either heed his message and act accordingly or go down with the Obama wanted sinking ship formerly known as America.

I, for one, intend to heed his message, and I apologize to Chief Justice Roberts for not understanding at first what he was covertly trying to tell us.  I hope others across the country understand this now as well.

Roberts' Ruling Took Guts 

By: Jonah Goldberg  / Townhall.net

 

 

Why not just cut open a goat and be done with it?

In ancient Rome, a special kind of priest called a haruspex would "read" the entrails of sheep to divine the will of the gods, the health of the growing season, or whatever else was weighing on the minds of men.

Because animal guts don't, in fact, impart that much information about, say, next year's wheat harvest, the haruspices (called "auspices" in Latin -- from which we get the English word) could pretty much make it up as they went along. The same went for the auguries (priests who studied the flight of birds). Ultimately, the auspices and auguries made their decisions based upon the whims, vicissitudes and demands of politics in one form or another. If the rulers were happy with the result, they didn't much care what the guts actually said.

Fast-forward to chief haruspex John Roberts.

In the majority opinion written by Roberts, the Supreme Court held that the mandate to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) is unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause. But Roberts also found that it's constitutional under Congress's power to tax. It is on these grounds that Roberts upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare, siding with the four liberal justices of the bench.

The upshot is that Congress cannot use the Commerce Clause to force you to eat broccoli, but it can tax you into doing so. Huzzah for liberty!

To reach this decision, Roberts had to embrace a position denied by the White House, Congress and vast swaths of the legal punditocracy: that the mandate is a tax for the purposes of constitutional consideration but not a tax according to the Anti-Injunction Act (which bars lawsuits against taxes until after they're levied). Roberts' effort, wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in dissent, "carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists."

Let the record show that the sophists were valued defenders of entrail-reading.

Of course, there are substantive arguments in favor of Roberts' reasoning. But as far as I can tell, no one is confident, never mind certain, that Roberts actually believes his own position. And among supporters of ObamaCare, from the White House on down, no one cares whether he does.

President Obama -- self-praised constitutional scholar -- mocked those who called the fees and penalties under ObamaCare a tax. Now he celebrates a decision that mocks him back. Democratic National Committee Executive Director (and former White House aide) Patrick Gaspard seemed to summarize the depth of concern on his side of the aisle when he responded to the ruling on Twitter: "it's constitutional. B----es."

More sober-eyed liberal legal experts took similar positions. Roberts' opinion was "statesmanlike," they claimed, and, more bizarrely, "apolitical." Some, such as constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen, speaking on National Public Radio, even celebrated Roberts' brilliance at finding a way to save the reputation of the court by deploying what Thomas Jefferson called "twistifications."

Indeed, before and after the ruling, much of the journalistic and legal establishment argued that a 5-4 ruling to overturn ObamaCare would be "political" because the majority would be comprised entirely of Republican appointees. But a 5-4 ruling to uphold ObamaCare would be apolitical because, well, it just would be.

In other words, if five conservative justices rule according to their well-known convictions, it's illegitimate.

But if Roberts twists himself like an illustration in the Kama Sutra to find a way to uphold the law, then that amounts to "leadership."

Now, I don't know what's in Roberts' heart, but no court watcher I've heard from puts much weight on the idea that Roberts did anything other than reason backward from the result he wanted in order to buy respect from the court's critics at the expense of his own beliefs.

At least that's one thing both fans and critics of this ruling can largely agree on.

Some of Roberts' defenders claim he's outmaneuvered everyone. By upholding ObamaCare, he's made future conservative decisions unassailable. He's poisoned the well of the commerce clause for liberals. He's removed the court as an election-year issue. He's gift-wrapped for Mitt Romney the attack that Obama has raised taxes massively, violating a host of promises and assurances. And, again, he's saved the legitimacy of the court.

That's all very interesting, but it leaves aside the real issue: None of those concerns are what was asked of the court. That so few people seem to care augurs poorly for the rule of law and the auspices of our republic.